A book that I had often seen
in bookshops but avoided because, let’s face it, I don’t really like
self-celebrating memoirs/reflections on an author’s life etc. Like a child, I only
read it because my mom said so. And clearly my mom knows best – sure, it’s a
self-celebrating reflection on the author’s life, but if the author in question
is Paul Auster, then the book is bound to be extremely well written and, at the
very least, the mirror of a very interesting life.
What this book has left me
with are chiefly two things: the love and profound respect Auster feels for his
wife Siri Hustvedt, and the fact that that he is, or at least he portrays
himself to be, rather happy at the prospect of growing old.
At times there are passages I
didn’t feel particularly interested in (some stories about his youth, for
instance, left me quite untouched), but overall the book is at the very least quite
thought-provoking. I never thought Paul Auster would have played pick-up
basketball growing up, as pretty much all of his sports references in his other
books seem to be about baseball, but reading about that made me happy, as did
seeing him go through all the houses he lived in and what these meant to him.
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